Healing Arts Programs (for Cumulative Grief, Loss, Trauma and Exhaustion)

 

The Vox Clamantis Center is especially designed to offer new programs that extend and deepen the uses of prescriptive music deliveries in an atmosphere of beauty, intimacy and reverence.  The Healing Arts Program is for those who lave been carrying tremendous responsibility, but find themselves to be bodily, psychologically or spiritually diminished.  Diminishment can surface in our lives as a vague or serious numbness, growing sadness, or even clinical depression.


At times, this phenomena is also related to “burn out,” and while burn out is a very serious condition pervasive to our culture, there are many other factors that can also contribute to this experience of an “inner death.”   If they are not addressed, in time, these depressions can become constitutional and result in more permanent physiological conditions.   We use the word healing with a heart towards history – healing is related to wholeness  and is not a symptom management approach to illness.


The Healing Arts Program embodies a profound spirituality/medicine interface, and is designed specifically to address the complex and overlapping experiences in a human biography that amount to cumulative grief, cumulative loss, cumulative trauma and cumulative exhaustion.  Central to this program is the recognition that a human being has a delicate physical body, is more than a physical body, and in order to speak reasonably about healing, benefits from a clinical practice that recognizes an integral unity of body, soul and spirit;   thinking, feeling and willing;  or head, heart and hands.


In this atmosphere, the patient-clinician relationship of trust not only makes room for the Benedictine values of listening and responding so core to monastic medicine, but also emphasizes the two-fold regime of monastic medicine:  “care of the body, cure of the soul.”  By nuancing care and cure, and by including the first two (body and soul) we have a genuine chance of also working with the spirituality of the one who has been so deeply affected by the blows and wounds of life.


Since the spring of 2003, the Healing Arts Program has been receiving children and adults from all walks of life, with a variety of medical and psychological diagnoses, and from every religious or non-religious identity.  They are all ambulatory or semi-ambulatory, some have sustained trauma from birth and others from life, and each has received a variety of different care programs suited to their one-of-a-kind needs and conditions.  Some come for a long, one-day visit, others come for an hour and a half each week for a dozen weeks, still others fly in from other cities and come for three or five day intensives.


From May through December of 2004, we will be receiving patients again for the Healing Arts Programs, and welcome readers to return to this page soon to receive more detailed information about the various possibilities offered this year and the practitioners/clinicians who will be in residence.


To learn about other Vox Clamantis programs, please go to Care for the Caregivers Program.


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© Therese Schroeder-Sheker 2003.  All rights reserved.